Linguists: boring? Incomprehensible? Evil?

Common wisdom—an oxymoron if ever there was one—has it that linguistics and linguists themselves have a bit of a reputation problem. Are linguists boring? Incomprehensible? Pointless? Evil? The contention of this paper is—given that perception is nine-tenths of reality—unless we ask, we’ll never know. — The Speculative Grammarian